Yeah. They RUINED Scholars. It's absolutely despressing for me as well...the dot-based dps rotation was satisfying. What they were thinking, I'll never know. But playing the job now isn't fun; honestly, I hate it.
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All these months later and the same glaring issue seems to be here. The changes made to the jobs increased our downtime while simultaneously simplifying what we do in our downtime. Spamming the same ability repeatedly only to refresh our DoT every 30 seconds is simply mind numbing. And what's worse is that every healer does the same thing. It's glare/broil/malefic and putting dia/bio/combust on the target.
Did we really need to remove a dot and bane from scholar as well as shadowflare so it could play exactly the same as white mage?
I understand if the devs suddenly want to change the healers to not use a lot of damage abilities. But then they need to give us something else during downtime in more of a support roll. Something. Because if they simplify it any further our downtime will consist of spamming a single ability.
I found on ffxiv reddit yesterday a poll for job satisfaction. While it was based on reddit, it still gathered a surprising number of responses. Here's the link and graph for the full results but I'm just going to focus healers here
https://www.reddit.com/r/ffxiv/comme...urvey_results/
https://imgur.com/a/ymqa7ju
several things were clear even though it was an unofficial survey.
1. Astrologian and Scholars are in the bottom 4 for player satisfaction. Scholar is number 2 most disliked job, Astrologian hovering between 3 and 4. Hardcore raiders like Astrologian a little more than the rest of the playerbase but even then its not much of an improvement despite the loud hardcore minority trying to tote it as an improvement. Sure does explain all the looking for shield healer parties on discord and reddit.
2. White mage's larger popularity compared to its fellow healers, is due to its improvements in lily from sb. But as Captain Price in mw1 says "Its not hard to improve on garbage"
3. White mage appears not to be so much liked, as least disliked or mixed feelings in comparison to all jobs. Every job higher consistently than it in all categories are jobs that have substantially higher satisfaction (gnb, drg, blm, pld)
The jobs that are approximately level with it are jobs that had base breaking reworks (mch, nin) and dnc
4. Changes to old abilities and downtime gutting has basically killed off the Ast and Sch playerbase, and it doesn't appear that any new healers are coming in to replace those that left in the 5.0 exodus. Who'd have thought? Clearly not SE
I am not a raider. I mostly do dungeons and normal trials. No interest in being a green dps. Yet, I also miss SCH having multiple DoTs, Bane, and Shadow Flare. They weren't remotely hard to use and felt fun to use.
*shrug*
I doubt it was about simplification to appeal to more players, or if so, it missed the mark. There seems to be shade thrown at casual players and those who don't raid, but, there was nothing confusing or hard about Aero 3. The lily system WHM has now isn't complicated, but it's far more complex that what WHM did previously, so if it's all about simplification why add that? Putting one or sticky DoTs on a target and using Bane wasn't complex or hard either, certainly no harder than managing the new tools SCH got. And the changes to Astro cards are almost a draw. Before you had to know which job would benefit from which card by how the mechanics of other jobs worked, as some loved more speed for instance but it threw other jobs off. Now you still have to learn and manage cards just in a different way. If learning what cards do and who should get them was too complex before, it's marginally better now but not by a large degree. I don't buy the "dumbing it down" idea as the main driver or logic behind the changes to healer jobs. They could just give us the current PvP bars for all jobs to do that :p
From a thread almost a year ago: